David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

And your suddenly having to go to D.C. (yes, well, supposedly) gave me a blame-free opportunity. Drive up to New Hampshire, get away from the heat and noise, spend some time with my brother. We hung out at the house mostly — Joey was still depressed about throwing his marriage away — though one afternoon we did get over into Vermont, to a used-book store run by a lady with cats. Joey beat her down on the price of some old compendium of myths he wanted for the engravings; to atone, I picked The Book of Great Conversations off the twenty-five-cent table and told her it came from the dollar table.

He called yesterday, speaking of Joey, to say he was doing a lot better. In case I’d been worried. I said I was doing a lot worse: that you had gone to live in Boston, that I hadn’t left the apartment for a week, hadn’t called work, didn’t know if I had a job anymore and, even if I did, couldn’t face going back and having to see Kate every day. I said I couldn’t sleep because of the car alarms and sirens. Kate, he said: refresh me. I refreshed him. Hm, he said. But the Kate thing was already over with, I said. Discussed. Worked through. Resolved. Hm, he said. Well, he said, as far as the job, they were probably just assuming I was taking two weeks instead of the one; if they were seriously upset, they would’ve called, no? He said he was sorry about your leaving, but guessed he’d seen it coming when we’d been up there at Christmas. What do you mean? I said. Why do you say that? Well, for one thing, he said, you never touched each other. He said, speaking as somebody who’d been through the same thing, that he knew I was going to come out of this stronger. Said at least in my case there were no children. Said maybe I could start seeing this Kate again. Joey. He runs off to the Outer Banks for a mad two-week interlude with his old used-to-be, she ends up going back to her husband (many tears), he comes home and Meg and the children are gone. And now he discovers there are no great new women in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

The night I arrived, in fact, he tried to talk me into getting back in the car and driving down to Boston to pick up college girls. Just as big as real women, he said, but stupider.

“Joey,” I said. “I just drove five hours.”

“So I’ll drive and you can sleep on the way down. Listen, I got a teensy thing of coke left. And we can absolutely get more once we’re in Boston. Fuck, let’s do some coke, you want to?”

But as of yesterday, he’d gotten the north side of the house painted, which badly needed it, he’d started cutting wood for the following winter — he likes it to dry for a year and a half — and he’d patched the leak in the woodshed with roofing tar. He’d probably just needed some physical exercise. Said he’d begun a new series of silkscreens, which were absolutely going to be the best things since those ducks he was doing a couple of years ago. They’re going to be — whatever the plural is of phoenix. But getting back to my thing: he’d always said that Gordon Conway was scum, and he was glad at least that now everybody would see it. Said as it turned out he guessed it was a damn good thing I’d talked him out of driving down to Boston that night. He’d planned to hit Gordon up, since Gordon generally kept enough coke around to sell, and it would’ve been an absolute mess if we’d knocked on the door and so on. Said he thought you might come back once the dust had a chance to settle. If that was what we both wanted. Said it seemed to him that despite everything there’d been a lot of love there.

Or something.

I remember speaking the vows and thinking, Maybe.

The day before the ceremony, we’d had that huge thing about whether Meg’s sister Jodie should be there. “What am I supposed to do?” I said. “Turn around at this point and disinvite her? You know, she drives down with them, thinking everything is cool, and — I mean, Cindy, this was literally years ago. She’s now a friend. Okay, what should I have done, not told you?”

“Yes,” you said. Then you said, “No.” Then you began to cry.

But then there were the times when, deferring to my choice of a movie or a restaurant, you used to take my hand and kiss it like a courtier. What were the proportions of sweetness and irony? Not that I ever wanted to pick it apart. This gesture was still in your repertoire as late as a few weeks ago, the night you felt like going down to one of the Indian joints on Sixth Street and I felt like going someplace where we could count on air conditioning. In retrospect, this last handkiss makes me wonder whether or not you and Gordon Conway had already made your arrangements.

As far as I know, you hadn’t met him before this spring, when you went up to Boston for Lynnette’s show. The three of you having lunch at some health food place. Which seemed fine: a friend of your friend Lynnette’s. I remembered him, of course, from when he’d been at Pratt with Joey, and I decided not to be gratuitously unpleasant by saying he’d always struck me as a poseur, and therefore just the kind of person who’d fasten onto Lynnette. Or vice versa. This must have been in April. (It was the weekend Kate and I broke our rule about each other’s apartments. She came here; we rented Syberberg’s Parsifal, ordered in from the good Chinese place, marveled at how Armin Jordan, playing Amfortas, had lip-synched so undetectably in close-up.) Now, at that point, I assume, you were telling me everything, or why would you have told me as much as you did? Well, maybe to preclude my hearing it from somebody else. Or maybe just to get some relief — I know, I’ve been there. I used to make a point of telling you what I hoped sounded like everything: how Kate and I, say, had spent half an hour on hands and knees wrenching misfed paper from increasingly deep places in the innards of that chronically misbehaving copier. Such truths, told forthrightly, kept the rest of the truth away; while telling them, I could almost believe that Kate was just the funny woman who worked two offices down. With the husband who sounded so interesting.

Now, the next thing I heard about your new friend Gordon was the following week: he and Lynnette were both bringing work to show to some dealers in SoHo, and could we all have dinner? This was the point, I decided, at which to get myself on record. “As you know,” I said, “Lynnette is not one of my favorite people. And I truly dislike Gordon Conway.”

“He speaks well of you, ” you said.

“He’s a ferret,” I said. “Are he and Lynnette an item?”

You said nothing.

“So where are you dining?” I said. “Elaine’s?”

You put your glass down. “Oh, fuck you.”

“Or, hey, there’s always Greenwich Village,” I said. “Where the real artists hang out. Now, me, there’s nothing I like better than real artists, you know? Getting together and being real. Should I bring a rose and eat it petal by petal?”

“I thought you weren’t going.”

“Are you ?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Well,” I said, “have a marvelous time.”

“Thank you.” You picked up your glass. “I intend to.”

And then nothing (meaning nothing I was told about) until two weeks ago, when the phone rang on Sunday morning. Me at the kitchen table, drinking coffee.

“I’ve got it,” you called. After a while you came out of the bedroom. I asked if you’d turned the fan off in there. You said you had to go to D.C.

“Why?” I said. “What’s up?”

“Marie,” you said. “She was in a car wreck. She died this morning.”

“ What ?” I said.

“Look, I have to pack. Would you please call and see what’s the first shuttle I could get?”